Friday, November 16, 2012

Ring Tutorial: Making a ring with a flower bead

Hi all, thought it was time for another jewelry tutorial! In my very first blog post, I showed everyone how to make rings out of everyday-buttons. At the end of that post, I also mentioned that I will demonstrate that same technique with beads that are made for jewelry-making purposes. So this is it; making a ring with a button bead. Many beads are drilled off-centered such as this bead I used below, they are mainly made this way for a dangling effect on earrings or bracelets. But with my method of wrapping these into individual rings, you will be able to get a lot more worth for each bead that you pay for.
Again, the technique used in this tutorial is practically identical to my first post; "Make Rings out of Buttons!" Same materials are used as well for this tutorial, so to save time, I'm not going to repeat the material list. Steps are as follow:

Wrap the wire through the flower stem onto the mandrel and wrap few times around the mandrel. Play with the length of the wire starting at 2 feet, that should be plenty to wrap 8-10 times around the mandrel. When desired width of the ring shank is reached, wrap the remaining wires around the stem(bottom) of the bead.

Take the ring off the mandrel, wrap wire on each side of the shank once then pull with pliers to ensure both sides are equally tight. Continue to wrap around the shank, snip off the ends on top of the shank so your fingers will not be against the sharp ends of the wire.

Put the completed ring back onto the mandrel to shape the roundness of the shank. And viola! You've got a wearable ring!

Hope you will try this tutorial, it really is as easy as it looks! If you are in the business of making and selling jewelry, when analyzing cost versus sale-price, you'd know that rings are sold at the highest margin compared to any other piece of jewelry. Since beads like these are typically sold by a batch, using these individually to make rings will yield much higher profits than using them as earring or bracelets. Of course this is just me speaking from my point of view based on my experiences; there are plenty designers out there that can up-sell anything lol. So this is it for this week. Hope you all like it! Comment if you have any questions or suggestions :)